Why Is it so Hard to Make Products that People Love?

Business people don't sit in their offices wondering how they
can make a product uglier, and designers don't want to create
products that won't sell. Everybody (usually) wants to do the right
thing for the company, the products and the customers. So why do so
many good designs get trampled during the product development
process? If everyone is trying to create something good for their
customers, why is the development process so rife with
disagreements and compromises that actually hurt businesses in the
long run? If everyone has the same good intentions, can't the
business people just make up their minds about what kind of product
they want to create and let design create the right solution?

Well, it's just not that easy, and it never will be. Remember
the challenges the business stakeholders are facing: it's hard to
figure out exactly who to build the product for, what business
goals to satisfy and which branding messages to convey through the
product. It's especially hard to do this early in the product
design and development cycle, because business strategies tend to
evolve over the development process—just like design strategies!
Grumblings about ever-changing decisions and lack of clarity aside,
everyone in the company is in the same boat. Everyone is working to
create something, and creation takes time, collaboration and
iteration.

Unfortunately, designers and business people don't speak the
same language, and they don't always share the same background and
values. They are different people who work in different ways and
worry about different things. Sometimes their difficulty
communicating results in products that aren't useful and don't make
money. With the best intentions, business people make decisions
that negatively impact design, and designers make decisions that
negatively impact business.

In order to make successful products, designers and business
people need to speak each other's language. They need a translator
to help them understand each others' goals and decision-making
process so that instead of inadvertently working against each
other, they can make each others' jobs easier. In product and web
development companies, project managers are responsible for
translating between business people and technologists.
Unfortunately, design teams don't often get this kind of help.
Designers are expected to translate between technologists, program
managers, product managers and business stakeholders on their own
to create designs that will work for users and for the business.
This doesn't always succeed, and even when it does, the process
takes time and effort away from the design process.

Successful designs require translating:

Business needs into a language that designers understand

Design considerations into a language that business people
understand

Knowledge about the users of our new products into a format
that helps drive both business and design decisions

Enter personas

Personas are richly presented, highly detailed descriptions of
individual users of a product. Personas can “stand in” for your
users during the entire product design process. Personas can be
created through user research, or in an “ad hoc” manner by
collecting knowledge and assumptions about users from various
stakeholders on the team. No matter how they are created, however,
personas are excellent translators between design and business.

Personas provide the shared vocabulary that bridges the
different points of view within the company.

Of course, thinking about actual customers and users is not a
new idea. Many companies understand their user segments, which are
typically described as a collection of demographic data. For
example, one target segment for a medical supply company might be
professionals working in nursing home facilities, between the ages
of 25 and 40, the majority with college educations. Segmentation is
also a kind of translation: creating segments allows marketers to
translate data into marketing plans. In this example, segmentation
would help our medical supply company decide to place ads with an
effective subset of medical publications and associations.
Segmentation does not, however, translate well between data and
design, especially when it comes to designing the interactions
between the user and the product. How would you design an interface
to complete a particular task knowing only that your users are
professionals working in the nursing homes, between the ages of 25
and 40, the majority with college educations? You can't.

Personas, on the other hand, do translate between data
and design. Personas are more specific than segments and therefore
much more actionable. If you know that Philip works as a
physician's assistant in a suburban nursing home, has very little
time between patients to enter in his notes (which are usually no
longer than a single paragraph,) then you can make appropriate
design decisions. You know you have to keep the note-entry
experience process very short and simple.

Personas translate between business-ese and design-ese

If everyone in the company agrees that a set of personas
embodies the key attributes of your product's intended users, it
becomes easier to communicate about everything else. Personas
provide the shared vocabulary that bridges the different points of
view within the company. Well-defined personas can:

Create a rich, shared understanding of what you mean when you
say “our customers” or “our users”

Create a shared vocabulary between multiple departments in your
organization

Enable yourself and other stakeholders to make informed
decisions about design alternatives

De-politicize the interactions between various teams in your
organization

Encourage the entire organization to focus on your customers'
goals

In one of my previous jobs, my team designed the interface for
online presentation software. Initially, the business idea was to
replace expensive sales conferences with online presentations. The
prioritized target segment was “product managers who have to
communicate with distributed sales forces.” I worked with my team
to create “Susan,” a product manager for a large printer
manufacturer who had to communicate with a dispersed sales team
efficiently. The executive staff looked at Susan and said “no, this
isn't right at all. Yes, she'll be interested ? but there's more
money we can make if we go for people who have to give
presentations more often. The sweet spot we're going for is the
investor relations markets. Those folks have to make big
presentations all the time.”

They changed their minds, we believed, as a result of seeing
Susan “in person.” But unlike in previous projects, this change
didn't set us back at all, because we created Susan before we began
any design work on the project. We used Susan as a tool to mirror
the information we heard back to the executive team–and it turns
out they didn't like it when they saw it from this new angle.
Instead of “changing horses mid-stream” (as they always seemed to
during our product development process), the executive team
clarified their goals in a language we could understand before we
even started preliminary sketches.

Exit Susan, enter “Lewis,” who worked in the investor relations
department of a large public company, and who was responsible for
preparing, but not delivering, online presentations. We showed
Lewis to the executive staff and they said “Yep, that's him.” Less
than a week had elapsed, and we were off and running.

When we reviewed our designs with the business stakeholders, we
were able to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each design
based on what Lewis would expect, need, and want out of the
product. Instead of getting into “he said/she said” arguments over
elements of the designs, all of us were able to consider the
business and aesthetic pros and cons of each option based on what
Lewis would want and need, not on our personal
perspectives.

Planning your persona effort

It's not difficult to understand how shared focus on a single
clearly defined persona (or small set of personas) can help during
the product design process. However, it can be difficult to
convince a client or an executive that personas are worth the time
and money it takes to create them. Any time designers do work that
doesn't “look like” design, stakeholders tend to get nervous.
Everyone wants to see mockups—but very few understand that there's
a lot of preparation and “non-design” work required to create a
great design.

No matter how you plan to create and use your personas, give
yourself time to do some careful planning:

Craft a list of communication/translation problems you would
like to solve–consider both business and design perspectives.

Create a plan for how you will incorporate customer research,
market data and get stakeholder involvement in persona
creation.

Think about how you will publicize the personas once they are
created.

Decide how you will use the personas during your day-to-day
design and review process. One of the biggest mistakes people make
when it comes to personas is to assume that the personas are “done”
once they are created.

Figure out how you will measure the success of personas as
translation tools. This can be as straightforward as deciding
whether or not the personas solved the problems you identified in
the first step.

In most cases, it makes sense to start small with assumption or
“ad hoc” personas to see how they can improve communication and
focus the team. You can validate these assumptions later in the
process once these personas have shown some value. The exception to
this rule is if your company is so research-driven that no one will
be willing to talk about personas that aren't firmly grounded in
hard data from the beginning.

What will change when you start using personas?

Let's imagine we work for the company that's creating an
application for the medical professionals described above. A
typical conversation between designers and business stakeholders
might sound something like this:

Business: We're targeting hospitals and
clinics. Right now there is no one selling into the niche we are
going for. And once we get one hospital on board, word will spread
like wildfire because it's such a cool product and there's huge
word of mouth in the medical community. We need the logo to be on
every page so people remember who made it.Design: The logo on every page? But to fit it on
we'll have to make it really small, and that will look
terrible.Business: Make it work. We have to get our name
out there.Design: #($#&*

With personas, the goal is to enable business and design to
express their desires and ideas in a language that both sides can
understand and that keeps the focus on the users:

Business: We're targeting hospitals and
clinics. Right now there is no one selling into the niche we are
going for. And once we get one hospital on board, word will spread
like wildfire because it's such a cool product and there's huge
word of mouth in the medical community. We need the logo to be on
every page so people remember who made it.Design: OK. But Philip is going to use this all
day every day, and he has to cover four patients every hour, which
means he has to get to each of their rooms, evaluate them, take
solid notes, and get the notes to the doctors if there's urgency.
He's in a hurry. He'll get annoyed if we put the logo on every page
because it will take up valuable screen space.Business: Hmm. I can see that. Well, we want
Philip to tell all his colleagues that our product is great—we need
to make ourselves into a “household name” for him.Design: Philip has to do a report every day at the
end of his shift. That report gets printed out, and everyone ends
up seeing it—Philip, his boss, the docs. Let's brand the heck out
of the reporting tools and the reports themselves.

When you hear names like “Philip” replace words like “user” and
“customer,” you'll know the personas are starting to work.

Business people and designers are never going to speak the same
language, and that's okay. Each needs their own language to get
their work done. To make great products, we have to create new ways
to understand each other and work together as we keep our
collective focus on the users of our products. Personas not only
help translate and keep communication channels open between
designers and business people, they also help to create and
maintain a focus on customers and their needs throughout the design
process. The persona approach has helped a variety of companies
(including retail giant Best Buy and veteran Medco) improve not
just their products and services, but their bottom line as
well.